


Arya Underfoot

by incrediblegirl24



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Modern AU, Stark Family Dynamics
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-09
Updated: 2020-12-22
Packaged: 2021-03-10 09:07:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 8,471
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27968045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/incrediblegirl24/pseuds/incrediblegirl24
Summary: A modern Stark family/Genarya story.
Relationships: Arya Stark/Gendry Waters
Comments: 18
Kudos: 104





	1. The Rule

Her unofficial rule had started when Arya learned to toddle, she reflected. She could even pick out the exact day in her memory.   
  
When Rob and Jon had been small, they had been rowdy, but at least easily contained. Then the girls came, and Catelyn had decided the boys were old enough to play outside unsupervised. “Don’t wake the baby,” was her near constant refrain as the back door of Winterfell would clatter shut behind the two boys. Sansa was a bit less of a handful, but she tailed Catelyn everywhere she went babbling away in baby-talk and then as she got older singing fairy-tale songs learned from Disney films.  
  
For a few years, when all her brood were small, Cat was content. She felt like the center of a tiny galaxy, with all the children spinning around her on their own paths, always moving but predictable and steady. They had a nanny, every well-off family did, but Cat didn’t need the sort of live-in help her own mother had insisted on; she hired a college student a few afternoons a week, and some occasional evenings when she and Ned had some society event or other.  
  
When Arya was nearly a year and a half old, Cat began to worry. Her younger daughter hadn’t taken her first steps yet and didn’t seem eager to at all.  
  
Then, all at once, one evening, their household came a tipping point. By that time Cat had had her first three children, she was well acquainted with the sensations and symptoms of pregnancy. Around midday, she unearthed one of the pregnancy tests still left in the bathroom from the day she had learned Arya was coming. She didn’t really need the little pink plus sign to confirm that she would soon have another baby, but it did make her head swim a little. Ned had already gone off to work, so she planned to tell him when he returned home that evening.  
  
A quarter of an hour before Ned was due home, everything still felt as if it were humming along smoothly: the boys were playing in the yard, Sansa was set-up at the kitchen table with a coloring book and the baby sitting next to her, looking on mildly while Cat set the table for dinner. A violent summer storm rolled in out of nowhere. Cat looked up from the sauce simmering on the stove when she noticed the light changing. Clouds dimmed the sun and the sky opened up faster than Cat could have believed. She assumed the boys would run in and seek shelter from the deluge, after all that’s what she and Lisa would have done when they were small.  
  
She could have sworn that she only looked back at the pan for a moment, but apparently that moment was enough. Sansa’s high, babyish rendition of ‘Under the Sea’ was interrupted by an indignant shriek. Cat whipped around in time to see the littlest Stark clutching a handful crayons, clambering off her chair and scurrying away from her sister as fast as her little legs could carry her. Sansa was already crying, “Muuuumm, Arya stole my crayons,” she intoned between wails. Cat hesitated in the act of chasing down Arya.  
  
“Oh, Sansa, she’ll learn to share, no need to cry,” Cat comforted. The sky began to lighten outside the kitchen windows. “And look, your sister learned to walk!” she added. “It’s not fair,” Sansa refused to be comforted. “I need the green for the mermaid’s tail.”  
  
Cat sighed, “Yes, dear. We’ll just ask her for it back,” she turned back to Arya.  
  
Arya was gone.  
  
Cat dashed down the hallway, just in time for the front door to open. Ned stepped inside but didn’t even have time to close the door before Rob ran through it behind him, soaked from head to toe and splattered with mud. Jon was hot on his heels, and even filthier. Arya had somehow gotten all the way down the length of the hall and up one of the stairs where she had one crayon in her mouth and was using another to draw a shaky green line all the way from the kitchen, up to her stair.  
  
Arya sat down hard on the step and reached her hands up towards her father; at the exact same moment, the smoke detector in the kitchen began screaming. The sauce Cat had been simmering had boiled over and begun flaming.  
  
Sansa was screaming. Rob bolted back out the front door he had just come through. Jon ran off the other direction, but he was back almost instantly, offering his father the fire extinguisher from the garage. Cat had Sansa under one arm, and Arya under the other, struggling valiantly not to cry.  
  
Ned sprayed the stove down with the fire extinguisher. Only once the flames were entirely out did Cat truly begin to sob. Ned pulled her close and stroked her hair. “It’s fine, it’s out. The kids are ok. You’re ok,” he murmured, soothing, into her ear.  
  
“How are we going to do this with another baby?!” Cat practically shouted into his shirt.  
  
After that day, each of the Stark children was required to find an outlet for their energies somewhere out of the house. Rob and Jon were signed up for tennis camp at Ned’s club. Sansa was enrolled in ballet at the local dance school. When she agreed to foster Theon Greyjoy, she was please to find out that his preferred sport was karate, which was done indoors and barefoot, and made no mess in her house so long as Theon remembered to empty his sports bag into the laundry basket and not all over the floor.  
  
She hadn’t counted on Arya’s fascination. Cat had packed four-year old Arya, and two-year old Bran into her high-end SUV. Cat was momentarily unnerved when Theon climbed into the passenger seat. None of her children were old enough to ride in the front, but Theon had nearly two years on Rob.  
  
They drove to the only dojo in Wintertown, a small space in a strip mall. It wasn’t quite the wrong side of town, but it was nearer than Cat would have liked. Still, the boy’s whole life had been uprooted and Cat would do whatever she could to help him retain some sense of normalcy. They parked and Theon helped her unbuckle the little ones quietly. He held Arya’s hand as they crossed the parking lot but dropped it quickly once inside.  
  
The only teacher, Rodrick, also owned the dojo. He signed Theon up on the spot, and offered to Cat, “if you can wait, we have a class beginning in twenty minutes.” Theon was mute, as he often was in those early days, but the plea was in his eyes as plain as anything. Cat consented.   
  
Cat, Bran, and Arya settled on the row of cold metal chairs near the door with a few other parents. Most of the participants were old enough that their parents just dropped them off and planned to pick them up after, but for his first one, Cat felt like she ought to stay. The class began with exercises that Theon already seemed to know. Her mind began to wonder away from the white-robed teens and tweens in front of her to other errands that she had meant to do that afternoon. Some they could still do on the ride home, but some would have to be rearranged to tomorrow, she decided. It was just as well, the nanny was scheduled to work tomorrow, so Cat could leave the children home with her.  
  
Bran’s eyes were locked on the class, absolutely riveted. Arya, though, had a bit more than looking on her mind. Catelyn was alerted by a laugh from one of the smaller kids in the class. Arya had shucked off her shoes, walked onto the mat, and begun trying her tiny best to follow along.  
  
She kicked her foot up as high as she could, over-balanced, and toppled back. She sprang back up off the padded floor and tried again. By her third attempt, she stayed on her feet, but she had also attracted the attention of every member of the class and the instructor. Rodrick handled the situation gracefully, scooping her up and into Cat’s arms, and refocusing the class on the combo they were meant to be learning.  
  
At the end of the class he informed Cat, “We have beginner classes for children as young as five if the sister would like to join.”  
  
Cat internally flinched at the word ‘sister’. Her family had grown beyond the charmed ideal she had grown up with, and she had long since decided that it wasn’t worth explaining who Jon was to strangers. Now that applied to Theon too. “She’s only four,” was Cat’s only response, “but perhaps we’ll be back in a few months.”  
  
She had rather expected Arya to forget all about by the time she turned five, intending to sign Arya up for the dance classes her sister loved so much. No sooner had she blown out all five of the candles on the little chocolate cake, then she turned to Cat and Ned and asked, “Can I sign up for karate now?”  
  
Ned had laughed and said of course she could. He would have given his baby girl anything she asked for, and Cat herself had insisted that the children burn off their energies outside the house.


	2. The Years After

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Arya does Arya things.  
> Parents respond as expected.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is probably the only chapter that will be from Theon's perspective.  
> I know the time scale is a little difficult to follow; these establishing chapters are meant to feel sort of retrospective.

After a few weeks, Cat delegated the cross-town trips to the dojo to the nanny and thought little more about it. All the rest of the Stark pack moved on to new hobbies sooner or later. Rob had abandoned tennis for soccer for a few seasons, and then lacrosse for a few more. Jon had accompanied him in switching to soccer, but he stuck with it after Rob moved on to lacrosse. Jon also signed up for basketball, and when one or the other was in season, Cat hardly saw him at all.

Sansa traded up her child-level dance classes into ballet, and then decided she wanted to be a figure skater. At some point she had lost track of over the years, Ned’s country club had installed a climbing wall where Bran climbed every chance he got. Rickon, after years on the side-lines at his siblings’ practices, games, and competitions tried everything and excelled at very nearly all of it.

Even with Cat, Ned, and the various nannies who passed through Winterfell in those years, scheduling was trended toward the chaotic. When Theon was old enough to drive, there was no question that they would buy him his own car. Rob and Jon had joined him at Wintertown’s elite prep school by that time, and he was assigned to drive them to school each morning.

Through all the years, the little dojo had stayed very much the same. Rodrick hired another teacher and filled up the schedule with more classes. Beginners classes were moved to the evenings to accommodate the parents’ schedules, and every afternoon from 3:30 to 4:30, the space was reserved for individual, high-level instruction. Theon left Rob and Jon at school for their practices, picked up Arya at the all-girls school she still attended with Sansa, and they trained most days a week. Secretly, he felt a bit disgruntled that this little girl was considered as high-level as he was. The nature of martial arts was that individuals progressed at their own rate, and those with dedication and discipline did so quickly.

Disgruntled as he was, Theon had nothing on Cat.

Both Theon and Arya signed up for the regional competition in White Harbor. It was the last year he would be eligible for the under 21 division; placing was as close to guaranteed as it could be. He had marked the dates on Cat and Ned’s calendars months ahead of time and made sure to remind them both several times. The morning before the competition Theon, Ned, Cat, Arya, and Rickon had piled into the mini-van before dawn and driven hours to White Harbor. Rob, Jon, Sansa, and Bran had all elected to stay home for their own commitments.

Theon and Arya unloaded their gear and checked in. They had done this enough by now that Theon knew she barely spoke in the intense focus that preceded a match. It wasn’t until he had carefully reviewed the schedule of matches that he noticed something.

“Arya, you’re supposed to be in the under 14 division,” he knew a few of the names listed across from hers. They were boys who had years, inches, and a lot of pounds on his tiny foster-sister. She didn’t react. “You could get seriously hurt fighting some of these guys. How could they make such a stupid mistake?” he complained.

Her eyes matched her voice as she said flatly, placidly, “I supposed my date of birth was written in wrong on the paperwork.”

Theon chewed his lip in a moment of indecision. She could hold her own against most of the roster, he was guessing. And, he reasoned further, there were referees and safety guidelines and all sorts of other precautions. It wasn’t worth sticking his nose in when he had his own matches to focus on.

Most of the elimination rounds were concurrent, so he and Arya went their separate ways for most of the day. It wasn’t until the last match in each division that it even occurred to him to worry about her again. It just figured that the thing that reminded him would be the announcement that she was fighting in the under 18s final. He sat on the sidelines with a bottle of water while the stands filled up around the main ring. The under 14 division had already been settled and the families who had been milling about watching their children’s various fights, plus the eliminated competitors congregated to see the last of the day.

The kid on the other side of the ring was nearly twice her height, clearly near the upper-age limit of the division, and brutal looking. Theon’s stomach turned over. He should have said something; he should have stopped this from happening. Arya was going to get her tiny ass beat into the floor.

The match was one of the longest he had ever sat through. Arya had stayed calm and defensive for the tense minutes in the beginning. Her opponent attacked over and over, and each time she slipped to the side, or ducked a blow just in time. Theon could hear audience members gasping.

He knew what she was about. She had once gotten the better of him the same way. The anger in the other fighter’s face grew moment by moment, and as it did his swings got wilder. “It looks like they’re dancing,” Theon realized. But then the very next moment, the opponent audibly growled at her and threw himself at her. The attack was vicious, even on the sidelines Theon tensed up. He heard Cat shriek from the stands behind him.

Arya stepped aside again, letting the older boy’s own force carry him across the ring. Instead of twisting away, she slammed her tiny fist into the back of the boy’s ribcage as he passed her. Rickon whooped from the stands. The boy grabbed her wrist and jerked her entire body as if it weighed nothing to him. The fight lasted and lasted, and when the boy finally tapped out, Cat was openly crying in the stands, Ned had gone pale, Rickon was on his feet cheering his little head off, and Arya had a broken lip and wild sparkle in her eyes.

Theon won his match too, but only Ned and Rickon had stayed to watch. They didn’t even stay to receive their medals; Ned hustled Theon and Rickon out into the parking lot where Cat was fussing over Arya. “I was so afraid for you. How did that even happen? You’re supposed to be in the under 14.”

Arya’s eyes still had that blazing look in them. “I knew I would win the under 14, Mum. What’s the point in entering that?”

The stony silence in van all the way back to Winterfell reminded Theon more of a funeral than a celebration of two gold medalists. The next morning Ned and Cat sat Arya down in the study. They had been in there for more than an hour, long enough for all the other siblings to wake up and begin to get curious about the situation. From the muffled shouts, it was soon clear that Cat wanted Arya to sign-up for something safer, and Arya had no intention of doing that whatsoever.

Ned had played peace-maker. He announced that Arya would be allowed to continue at the dojo, but not sign-up for any further competitions.

They resumed their normal pattern. Theon had graduated from Northern Prep by the time that Arya enrolled, but he had decided to stay at Winterfell. He had mostly morning classes at Wintertown University, so they kept right on going to afternoon practice at the dojo.


	3. The Pack Divides

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter covers a lot of the same time as The Years After, but from Arya's perspective.  
> I promise the Gendarya is forthcoming.

The big house in Winterfell was rarely quiet, what with Theon, all her siblings, and all their friends traipsing in and out all the time. Sansa’s friends congregated in her room, watching movies, gossiping, painting one anothers’ nails, and teasing Arya whenever they had the change. Arya spent more of her time with Theon, Rob, and Jon, playing basketball in the driveway when the sun was out or video games in the basement when it was not.

As they all got older, driveway basketball became less common. They all had more schoolwork, which she supposed, was part of it. More than that, the boys were getting more competitive, more likely to get embarrassed if their friends saw them playing with their baby sister. At her mother insistence, her father took the hoop, now rusty and unused, down a few months after Theon’s sixteenth birthday. Theon parked his new shiny, black BMW in the spot they had used as the free throw line.

It took a surprising amount of paperwork to make sure that Theon was legally allowed to pick her up from school, Arya was annoyed to discover. Ned and Cat had to meet with Headmistress Mordaine on two occasions to confirm that this young man who was neither a legal adult, nor technically, her brother was going to be picking Arya up and driving her across town to a dojo, where they would learn to fight. This information had scandalized the headmistress, and for months afterward, she gave Arya cold looks in the halls and at all-school assemblies. Evidently, it was not an activity befitting of young ladies. Arya felt that they could have left the school out of these discussions entirely, and the school should have trusted her not to get into cars with strangers.

As much as she resented the distractions of teenager-hood that had pulled the pack apart, but she had to admit, it was nice to ride with Theon. He picked her up from the all-girls prep school nearly every day and never once insisted on her sitting in the back-seat the way the nanny had. Their rides tended to be quiet. Theon listened to more music than anyone else she knew; he had a new playlist nearly every day, and he went through new genres week by week. She didn’t like all of them, but it was far superior to the strains of the same four pop divas that she heard all the time through the wall that separated her room from Sansa’s.

They trained for at least an hour each day, coached by Rodrick, and then later his newly hired instructor, Syrio. Syrio was former Israeli Special Forces. Theon had once made fun of his accent, but only that once. He was full of encouraging sayings, and he seemed never to notice that Arya was the smallest, youngest member of the class. Arya in particular excelled at the lightning-fast style he favored, and she ran through all the exercises he recommended over and over both in the dojo and at home, alone in her room.

Both she and Theon had entered tournaments before, and she had always done well, as evidenced by the small host of gold medals Catelyn had pinned up next to Rob and Jon’s soccer ribbons and framed photos from Sansa’s dance recitals. Training under Syrio, she knew she was getting better all the time. When it was time to sign up for the tournament in White Harbor, Arya couldn’t see any point in fighting in her proper age group. She added a few years to her age, submitted the form, and didn’t mention anything about it to anyone.

The whole drive to White Harbor, she had a flutter of excitement going in her stomach. Her parents would see her fight for the first time in years, and surely, when they saw how much she had improved, they would let her sign up for bigger tournaments, even farther away. ‘In a few years, nationals, maybe even the Olympic team,’ she barely dared to hope.

By the time they arrived home that night, that hope had been dashed to smithereens. Arya stared intently up at her ceiling, frustrating thoughts floating up to the surface of her mind. She thought her mother’s reaction would have made sense if she had lost. If Arya had come home in a cast, or concussed, or missing teeth, perhaps the hysteria would have been appropriate. ‘But I won,’ Arya growled under her breath, punching her pillow into a more comfortable position. ‘I won, and it’s like they didn’t even see it.’

The next morning, Ned called her into his study. She sat down across the desk from him, reminded forcefully of all the times she had to sit across from Headmistress Mordaine and be admonished for some other un-ladylike she had done. “Arya, your mother and I would like you to quit the dojo. Perhaps you can try ice skating with Sansa, or soccer like your brothers,” he began.

Arya’s counter was quick and blunt, “No.”

They stared at each other. Ned sighed deeply, “Arya, what we witnessed yesterday,” he took a breath, and frowned, “has made us reconsider allowing your martial arts training. It’s simply too high risk for a young woman.”

She bit back her retort. ‘There you go Syrio, calm as still water,’ she thought as she collected herself.

“I am a fighter,” she stared into her father’s face. “Even if you won’t let me train, I’ll still be a fighter. The way to make it safer is for me to get better.”

Ned was never the type to yell at any of his children, but his next words were so harshly icy, Arya wished he had shouted them. “Arya, you are a thirteen year old girl. You entered yourself in a competition with adult men. That boy you fought yesterday was twice your size, and five years older than you.”

“That boy I beat yesterday, you mean,” Arya snapped before she could stop herself.

Ned did not find her comment amusing. “This afternoon, your mother and I will call Rodrick, and make it clear that you are not to engage in any training beyond the basics, appropriate for children. We will not pay for any more tournament entry fees, nor sign any tournament permission paperwork. You are dismissed.”

She left.

The next Monday, at the dojo, Syrio tutted at her. “Where is your mind today? It should be here, with your body.”

She stared at him, a little incredulous, “Didn’t Rodrick tell you that I’m being demoted. Back to practice that my parents think is,” she made air quotes, “appropriate for children.”

Syrio barely suppressed a smirk. “You are an extraordinary child. What is appropriate for you is extraordinary instruction.”

It was the highest praise Arya could ever remember receiving.

The secret that she was still training, harder than ever, made Arya feel even more splintered from her family. Theon finally left Winterfell one autumn, after his university graduation. He returned to the Iron Islands for law school. They had never openly discussed her continued, intense training, but she knew that he had kept her secret and she was grateful.

Rob received the vintage, smoky silver Jaguar he had asked for when he got his license, and it seemed to Arya that he was hardly heard from again at Winterfell. Rob spent all his afternoons at practices, or friends’ houses, or girlfriends’ houses, so the duty of dropping her off at the dojo or retrieving her often fell to Jon. Jon had not asked for a car, even though he gained his driving license just a few months after Rob; Arya knew it was another one of the strange, unspoken divisions between Jon and the other Stark siblings that she hated.

Sansa, it seemed, adopted a whole new pack comprised entirely of giggling girls. They were constantly swarming around Winterfell, getting ready to go out somewhere or returning from having been out somewhere. Many of them were the same girls who had called Arya ‘horse-faced’ when they had all been much younger, but now at least, they left her more or less alone.

Bran fell. He had gone out one day, climbing one of the nearby mountains, and he fell. The days that he was in the hospital, the door to his empty bedroom drew Arya’s eyes like a car wreck.

Bran lived. He came home in a wheelchair, and there was a flurry of activity around Winterfell, making sure that the old house would be able to accommodate him. With climbing and sports now impossible, he turned to academic pursuits; he joined the debate team and was soon so far ahead of his classmates in school that Catelyn and Ned decided to hire a tutor. Mr. Lewin was an old, semi-retired teacher, and he spent many afternoons at the kitchen table with Bran pouring over every new interest that occurred to one of them.

Rickon stood out from the pack by being wild-spirited and often, wild-tempered. Twice, he was suspended from the all-boys school for hitting classmates who had made fun of Bran’s wheelchair. He was asked to leave the local junior soccer league, despite being the fastest kid on the field, because he swore at coaches and referees. There were a lot of times, although she didn’t say it, that Arya thought Rickon had the right of things, even if he addressed them in ways that their parents did not like. Arya took up running around their wealthy neighborhood, as conditioning for her martial arts training. She started inviting Rickon, even though he set a crushing pace.

Arya emailed Theon to ask him to send recommendations for a running playlist. Theon’s response was a list over an hour long. Arya shared it with Rickon. Two weeks later, Theon sent another, and again every two weeks after that often without any greeting, preamble, or small talk. Rickon was never very talkative on runs, but once at the end of a particularly long run, they were taking off their shoes in the garage (Catelyn insisted no muddy sneakers in the house) he told her, “This is the only time I ever really feel peaceful.” Arya hugged her little, although now taller, brother.


	4. King's Landing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> a bit of a filler chapter, Arya goes to college

University further separated their pack, Arya thought. Theon had gone to Wintertown University, but eventually he went back to the Iron islands to enroll in law school. Jon quietly accepted a full-ride soccer scholarship to Castle Black College; Rob went off to the prestigious University of Dorne; Sansa disappointed their mother for the first time ever by enrolling in a theater arts program at the tiny King’s College in King’s Landing.

Arya let her parents’ expectations fill in a lot of the details of her own journey into higher education. Her grades were good, and her family name was better, so nearly every school in the country was open to her. She felt very little passion about the university she enrolled in, but Ned and Cat’s gushed that they were proud of her. Privately, Arya suspected they were just relieved that she had chosen college-education at all. On her entry paperwork, she selected a business major and an economics minor, figuring if she didn’t like it, she would just change it later.

Blackwater University was the biggest university in Westeros. Her graduating class at Wintertown Prep hadn’t even numbered fifty students; during the school year Blackwater University was home to over fifty thousand. The massive campus, tucked into an even more massive capital city, let her feel anonymous for the first time in her young life. Hardly anyone noticed that she was Arya Stark, daughter of Eddard Stark. Even better, no one had ever met Rob, or Jon, or Sansa. Not one professor ever saw her name on the class roster and asked her how her charming siblings were doing. None of the other students had heard Sansa and her merry band of sycophants call her “Horse-Face” all through primary school. (The nickname had stuck even after Sansa had transferred up to the prep school, and Arya had found it impossible to make friends with the other girls.)

She was shocked to find how easy it was to get along with her classmates, her dormmates, the staff at the campus library and gym and dining halls. Eventually, she chalked it up to the options. In a small town, everyone had to know everyone, whether you liked them or not. Here, you could live in the same building with a few hundred other people, and never have to interact with them at all. She made a gym-friend, a junior boy named Micah; a dorm-friend, the RA from the boys’ floor, Hot Pie, who had a contraband hot plate and toaster oven in his room, but never got in trouble because he shared fresh, homemade treats so freely no one could bear to bust him; and a class-friend, a dark-haired senior, whom Arya considered a friend even though she had forgotten the girls name after hearing it once.  
The first month of school life suited Arya well. She missed her home, but the thing she missed most was her dojo.

She found a replacement, past the southern edge of the campus, that shared a parking lot with an auto shop and let her sign-up for an advanced class and open mat time without a credit card. Ned and Catelyn had given her a card for ‘textbooks and incidentals’ but they hadn’t said a word about continued training. Arya knew that they were hoping she would give it up, now that she was away from home with the whole wide world of possibilities open to her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I forgot to post this originally, so if you were here then and got the chapters in the wrong order, sorry about that!


	5. Across the Parking Lot

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gendry finally shows up, drinks tea.

He often worked through lunch. It was easier to focus when everyone else was gone from the shop and the other machines were quiet. He got more done sometimes in that hour than in the rest of the day all together. The result was that he usually ate sitting on the bus stop bench at the end of his shift. The dojo across the lot was as interesting a place to look as any, especially at that time of day. Only a few students and their old, grumpy looking teacher would be there, working on whatever they did, sometimes tossing one another onto the mats and once into (but fortunately not through) the plate glass window.

If he was honest, one student attracted more of his attention than the others. She was tiny compared to the rest, and she looked like she was the youngest by several years. Despite that she was the throw-ee pummeling someone to the floor more often than she was thrown herself. Once Gendry thought he heard another one of the classmates call her Arry.

A few weeks after she appeared at the dojo, he realized she was watching him back. Most often he was still waiting for the always-delayed bus when she finished. Her short hair was sweaty and spiky looking, and even across the parking lot he could see that her eyes were sparkling and exhilarated. Those bright eyes locked on his, and she quickly scanned every detail of his appearance.

Considering he was fully clothed and in public it was amazing how naked her gaze made him feel. Like she knew every detail of his daily life, his upbringing, his hopes, dreams, and whatever she cared to know simply by scanning the oil and engine grime permanently embedded under and around his nails.

One day, when King’s Landing was making its annual autumn decline into the low 50’s, he saw her catch sight of him through the glass door. Her eyes flicked over him, and she seemed to remember something. She turned back around and disappeared into the building. She was back again before the bus came, now holding a disposable paper coffee cup. He knew he was being obvious, staring, but she didn’t look away. Instead, she strolled right up to him, and pushed the cup into his hands.

“Tea,” she said as if that was a reasonable explanation for a teenager wandering up to a strange man with a beverage.

“Um,” he said. An irritating voice in the back of his head said, ‘don’t be a dumb ass, she’s cute’. A less irritating, more responsible sounding voice opined, ‘let’s find out how old she is before we start saying she’s cute’.

She crooked one eyebrow up at him, “You looked cold.”

“I am,” said Gendry. The irritating voice chimed in again, ‘introduce yourself, she’s cute’. “I am Gendry,” he added.

“Nice to meet you, Cold Gendry, I am Arya,” she matched his awkward pauses.

“Aren’t you cold? You don’t have a jacket,” he pointed out. He hoped that wasn’t rude, but it seemed that normal rules of conversation did not apply with Arya.

“No, I’m from the North,” said Arya matter-of-factly. Her skin was sticky with sweat, and her shirt was still damp enough to cling to her body. Not that he was looking, he tried to assuage the responsible part of his brain.

Gendry desperately tried to think of something witty or flirty to say, but the bus chose that moment to finally arrive. “This is my bus,” he informed her.

“Have a good night, Cold Gendry,” she smiled slightly.

“I, um, thank you? and thank you for the tea,” he never drank tea. She set off on foot, and he clambered onto the bus. Once he had found a seat, he took a sip of the tea. The taste was light and pleasant, and he grinned as the thought fully sank in, she had made it for him. Maybe she liked what she had been seeing across the parking lot as much as he did.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> have I made the characters American? Yes.  
> My excuse is that George R.R. Martin is from New Jersey.
> 
> I realized that I didn't mention before - I don't know jack about martial arts, but I based a decent amount of Arya's upbringing story off of Bak Sun from Sense8; for two such different pieces of media, I think those two characters are super similar. Anyone else see the resemblance or am I crazy?


	6. Cold Gendry and Hot Dorms

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things Arya is not prepared for: Cold Gendry and Hot Dorms

The radiator had to be broken.

It had to be. No properly functioning system would be shimmering with heat when the room was already sweltering.

Arya was stripped down to her underwear and a cotton tank top, red-faced and sweating, trying to force her dorm room’s tiny painted-shut window open when her roommate, Beth, arrived home.  
Beth was always perfectly nice to Arya. The first week they had moved in together, Beth had made it perfectly clear that her massive stash of study-snacks was also Arya’s massive stash of study snacks. It was still hard for Arya to suppress a wave of jealousy when Beth strolled in, looking like the one of the goddamned Instagram models that she followed for makeup tips, even down to the cute reusable coffee mug clutched in her hand. It was impossible not to draw the comparisons between them, and especially at that moment, Arya felt herself a little lacking.

More to distract herself, she announced to Beth, “Hey, the heater’s broke. Do you know how we get someone to come fix it?”

Beth laughed, unwrapping a scarf from around her neck, “I think it’s supposed to be doing that, it’s the heater.”

Arya glared.

Beth shrugged out of her long duster jacket and surveyed Arya’s attempt on the window. “I think it’s unlocked, if we could just get through this paint.”

“You’ll help?” Arya grinned conspiratorially.

“Of course I’ll help, I bet your family would sue me to the Seven Hells if you died of a heat stroke in our room.”

Arya nodded. She knew Beth’s family came from much more modest means than hers, and that she relied heavily on both women in STEM scholarship money and student loans to afford Blackwater. They had never discussed it really, but every once in a while Beth would mention her family in a way that made them sound like characters in a fantasy novel: potentially evil, and completely disengaged from reality.

“Jon gave me a pocket knife for my birthday,” she began digging through her desk drawers.

It was still several more minutes of work, but eventually they scraped away enough of the paint to force the window open a few inches. Arya pressed her face close the gap and breathed in the cool air.  
Beth grinned at her, “are you going to be okay?”

Arya considered, “I am not prepared for the South. Someone should have warned me. Sansa, Rob, they should have prepared me for this.”

Beth patted her on the head. “It’ll be nice and chilly for you soon enough.”

“Assuming I don’t roast to death in this oven-disguised-as-a-dorm.”

Beth laughed. “I just came to grab my computer, I have to hit the library,” she picked up a deep green backpack from the floor and began winding her laptop’s power cord. “I don’t know about this double major thing I’ve gotten myself into.”

“Are you going to be okay with it if we leave this window open all winter?” Arya queried.

“I supposed I can wear sweaters,” Beth was already bundling up again.

They were both busy; Beth’s schedule was to spend nearly all day darting back and forth between the computer science building and the campus library. Arya’s was to wake up early for the gym and early classes, come back to their room for much of the day, and head to the dojo for evening training. She was content to hang around the dorm or the student union on weekends, but Beth went on honest-to-God dates: grown-up, non-college-student dates that seemed to require dressing up and kept her out until all hours.

Arya frowned. Did she know Beth well enough to ask for her advice?

‘No,’ she decided. If she wasn’t sure, it was better to stay still and quiet. That was the strategy that worked best with her family.

==|==|==|==|==|==|==|==|==|==|==|==|==|==|==|==|==|==|

After the time she brought him tea, Arya didn’t see Gendry again for several weeks. She spent less time training in the run up to her midterm, and the days that she did go, he wasn’t on his bus stop bench.

He stuck in the back of her mind though. He was not the first boy she had been attracted to, she thought. But something about ‘boy’ caught her. She couldn’t be sure how old he was, but she knew that he worked so she could at least guess that he was out of school.

He fixed cars, that much she could tell by the ‘Mott’s Auto’ emblem on his tee shirts, and the engine grime staining his hands. Rob had been ‘into cars’ as a hobby, but Cat had always insisted on him scrubbing any trace of oil off before he came in the house. She knew he was local to King’s Landing, he had the accent. And she knew she could run into him again.

Her childhood crushes had been of exactly two varieties: musicians and boys she had met at competitions. She never met the boy band members, and the boys she fought never seemed eager to flirt with her after, so Arya had arrived at 17 without ever having had a boyfriend. Sansa had taken this as open license to mock her for her lesbianism. Arya privately thought lesbianism sounded better than dating the boys who went to Northern Prep with her brothers. They had all been carbon-copies of the same button-down-shirt-wearing, golf-playing private school archetype that she loathed.

The next time she saw him, his bus was pulling up the same moment she was stepping out the door. She lifted her hand the wave, but he must have missed her because he failed to react.

Midterms had come and gone before she got a chance to talk to him again.

“Hey,” she strolled across the parking lot to his bench.

He glanced up from his phone and looked surprised. “Hi.”

The moment lingered just a fraction too long and Arya frowned. She hadn’t actually planned anything beyond ‘hey’. He spared her from having to come up with a topic by asking, “What, no tea today?”

“No, you actually remember to bundle up today,” she nodded at his entirely too warm coat.

“It was good tea,” Gendry said. “I don’t usually like tea.”

Arya filed this new information away her small list of Gendry Facts. “You haven’t been around much lately.” She could have kicked herself. She had basically just admitted to looking for him every goddamn day.

“Yes, I have,” he countered. “I’ve been working overtime.”

“Oh, uh. Cool,” she said.

She heard the bus as it came around the corner behind her. Gendry stood. Had she never noticed how tall he was before? He was usually sitting down. She had to tilt her head up to look into his face.

“Have a nice night,” he said, digging a bus pass out of his pocket.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I only sort of know where this is going, but I am having fun. :)


	7. The Best We Can Do

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gendry's back story.

It took him close to a year, but Gendry had settled into a routine. Most of his life, it had been impossible to think that he would come home to the same place day after day.

His mother had passed when he was too young to look out for himself, but he was just old enough to be ‘unadoptable’. He spent all of middle school and the beginning of high school being shifted between short-term placements in foster homes. During his first attempt at a freshman year, he had twelve different addresses and attended three schools. During his second freshman year, he grew six inches and started gaining muscle.

“Look kid,” the social worker was probably about six years older than him, “plenty of people will take in a reedy little kid for the extra money, but no one wants a kid who looks like a grown-ass man. Shave, keep your head down, and we’ll do the best we can for you.” The best they could do turned out to be a group home in the far northeast corner of the city.

It was practically impossible to sleep the first few weeks he lived in the home. At least one fight seemed to break out at every meal, and every night the boys slept a dozen to a room, tossing, turning, and sometimes having vivid nightmares that woke up all their bunkmates. Gendry did not pick fights, but every once in a while, one of the other boys, usually a new one, would get it into his head that he was going to fight the biggest kid in the building. By the time he was a junior, Gendry was the biggest (Sandor having been hauled off to jail or killed in a drive-by, depending on which rumor you believed), and he learned quickly that most opponents would lose their bravado if hit hard enough in the stomach.

The only good thing that happened to Gendry there was the doddering old director, Jon Arryn, who had pointed him to the vocational high school two streets away. His academic performance had never really been good, but he found that he had a natural skill with engines. Jon had even gotten him a summer job at Mott’s. Exactly how Jon knew Mr. Mott, Gendry never found out. The shop was busy and noisy, but at least instead of angry, alienated teenagers it was full of men in their 20’s and 30’s who chattered about their wives and their lives whenever they could make themselves heard over the machine sounds. Mott himself was perhaps not kind, but as reasonable a boss as he could have hoped for, and he signed and distributed paychecks every Friday like clockwork.

Gendry had not technically dropped out of high school, he kept right on going until the last day of senior year, but he also hadn’t exactly passed all of his classes. The school’s guidance counselor called him into the office one hot, sticky day in late May.

“You won’t be able to walk in June,” the counselor sounded as if she was reading off a script. Gendry felt a flair of anger, but he said nothing. His formative years had been spent around adults who, at the best of times were over-worked, over-whelmed, and under-funded.

‘It’s not her fault,’ he reminded himself, biting back a smart ass reply.

She consulted a file on her desk, which Gendry could only assume was his school record. “The only credits that you are missing are twelfth-grade English and History, and then only by a few points. If you enroll in summer school, you can receive your diploma by September.”

Gendry nodded.

“The cost is,” and Gendry cut her off.

“Whatever the cost is, I can’t afford it.”

The counselor looked vaguely pained, and she looked down at the file again. “I see,” she looked up from the file, “you live at Steele Hall?”

Gendry nodded again.

“And you turned eighteen last month.”

Another nod.

“You’ll lose your place there as soon as the school year is over, is that correct?”

Gendry simply stared. He hated the group home, but he knew that the options he’d be faced with after he lost his spot were very likely worse.

The counselor glanced at the file again. “Okay,” she drew out the word. “The state says that I am supposed to do everything in my power to convince you to get your diploma, so we’ll just say I’ve done that,” she checked a box on some form. “The good news is that you will still get your technical certification. Do you have a job?”

“Yes,” Gendry’s summer job at Mott’s had turned into an after school job.

“Any chance of that becoming full time?” she asked sharply.

Gendry shrugged.

“Make that your priority,” she sighed. “Get a roof over your head and health insurance. Once you’ve done that come back here and we’ll get you set up with night school. You can get a GED. That’s the best we can do for you.” She handed him a carbon copy of whatever the form was.

He stuffed it in his pocket without reading it and wondered if there was anything in the word that would convince him to come back to this place.

That very same day, he asked Mr. Mott to make his job full-time. Mr. Mott gave him a long, searching look before answering. “Sure, kid. Same hourly rate, but you can get 40 hours a week and we’ll get you on the health insurance plan in the fall when it’s open enrollment. That’s the best we can do for you.”

Gendry accepted. On the last day of his senior year, he packed everything he owned into his backpack and black trash bag. No one made any acknowledgement that he was leaving, nor did he stop to say goodbye to anyone.

For the first few weeks of summer, he lived on a couch in one of his coworker’s basements. The next few months, he rented a room that he had found on Craigslist. The house had, technically, four bedrooms, but the living room and the basement were also rented, and at any given time ten teenagers and twenty-somethings lived there. A few of them had lived there for years and called themselves The Brotherhood. Gendry couldn’t tell if they had jobs; he thought perhaps they attended the local community college but if they did it was rarely.

He didn’t trust them, not after all the crap he had put up with from the group home boys. Gendry installed a lock on his door and opened a bank account so he could stop keeping all his cash in a shoebox. He moved a few more times before he was twenty-one, but eventually he had saved enough, and he was making enough at the shop to get his own apartment.

It was, in a word, tiny. He had avoided his old neighborhood in the northeast and found a one-room apartment on the very southern edge of the city. The street was full of old houses that had been very nice, once upon a time, but had since been divided up into as many small apartment units as possible. His had been the attic of the house, many years ago, and the roof sloped so he could only stand-up right in the very center of the room.

He bought the old couch he had used to sleep on from his coworker, a TV from a pawn shop, a single pan from the thrift store, and a basket’s worth of groceries from a dollar store. Despite years of working on cars, he still didn’t have one of his own, and his salary just barely covered all his necessities, but it was the most stable period of his life that he could remember.

Work, his home, the bus, the sound of his downstairs neighbor singing in some language that he didn’t know, all of these things became a pattern. The peace of it felt deceptive; Gendry kept his guard up all the time. He saved every penny that he could, and tried not panic every time he had some small, but necessary expense. The first time one of the three lightbulbs in the apartment burned out, Gendry left it that way for a week. Only when he stubbed his toe painfully did he finally rationalize buying a cheap pack of light bulbs.

After six months or more, the feeling that all of this might be fleeting began to fade. He got a tattoo, because he had always wanted one, and then he got another because he liked the first one so much. On his twenty-first birthday, he bought himself a beer at the bar a block and half down from his apartment. He quite liked the little pub, which boasted a single TV and a pool table. He got into the habit of stopping every Friday evening on his way home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter bummed me out quite a bit. If there are lots of mistakes in it, that's because I didn't want to read it over to find them and fix them.


End file.
